My love for history
began when I was a kid. I remember
one Christmas I got a book containing stories, letters, and images of real
people during World War II. I was spellbound. Here were ordinary people doing
extraordinary things in extraordinary times. The victory gardeners, the Navajo code talkers, the
concentration camp inmates, the D-Day soldiers. Perversely, I was actually jealous of these people—they got
to live history. All I could do was read about it. In the naïve, grammar-school mind of an
upper-middle class white girl, history was over. The world, or at least my world, was stable and
prosperous. Nothing exciting or
dangerous would ever happen again.
The struggles of earlier generations had born the fruit that was my
blissful childhood in the ‘90s.
Of course, I was so
wrong. I had thought of
history as stories with neat beginnings, middles, and ends. It was a convenient way to take it all
in. But history does not happen
that way. We can’t know how
historians will classify the present moment. Is this moment—the departure of the UK from the EU, the rise
of Donald Trump—the beginning of a new, fearful era in the experiment of
liberal democracies? Is it a
strange, momentary aberration in the trend toward global economic
cooperation? Or is it (pause for
melodrama) the end of the world as we know it???
When I read history now,
I consciously try to erase my bias of hindsight. I had realized I was taking events in history for granted.
Of course the Allies won World War II.
Of course the D-Day invasion worked. Of course Neville Chamberlain should have known never to
shake Hitler’s hand. But
when I suspend my knowledge of how the story ends, the plot becomes more
treacherous. Certain characters,
like Chamberlain, engender more sympathy.
His country had not long before emerged from the worst war it had ever
known. He did not know something
more terrible could be on the horizon.
Other characters, like Eisenhower and his D-Day soldiers, earn even more
admiration and awe. The D-Day invasion
had absolutely no guarantee of success.
Eliminating the advantage of hindsight allows us to understand that the
moments we study in history are defined by their uncertainty.
More now than at any
other time in my life, I am hyper-aware of the uncertainty of the future. For the first time, I look to the
future with great unease. The only
other moment rivaling this is 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, but the difference
between now and then is my faith in the stability of government. I don’t know if we can overcome the
dysfunction in Washington. I am
afraid of a Trump presidency. I
don’t know if our system and national wellbeing can weather his ignorance and narcissism. That scares me more than terrorism.
I finally feel like I’m
living history, but I wish I could tell fourth-grade Claire that it’s not as
cool as we thought.
